How to Make Materials Accessible

This page provides an overview of resources available in the Instructional Design Center (IDC) to help you use technology effectively in designing accessible content.

Checklist: The following checklist provides recommendations that benefit everyone, regardless of their ability, to access and interact with the materials. Accessibility Checklist to follow when checking digital content.

Panel: If you missed the Creating Accessible Course Materials Panel Discussion, you can watch the YouTube recording by clicking on Creating Accessible Course Material Panel Discussion (50:37).

Getting Started

The resources provided will help with editing and creating accessible materials. Additional resources include:

Adobe Acrobat Pro (part of the Adobe Cloud suite) is a powerful tool used to help bring PDFs into digital accessibility compliance. It can be accessed from the following locations:
- Virtual Open Lab sign in using your Bison login - 20 seats
- Instructional Design Center Quentin Burdick Building (QBB)150 Open Lab - 7 seats
- Library 201 Data Visualization Lab with Remote Access - 16 seats
- A. Glenn Hill Center (AGHC) 240 General Purpose Classroom - 48 seats
- Minard 332 General Purpose Classroom - 15 seats
- Memorial Union 250G Bison Information Network Departmental Lab - 16 seats
Ally Blackboard tool used to score digital course content for accessibility, includes instructions for fixing the issues, and alternative format downloads for students.
How to Make Your Course Accessible lists the top 15 accessibility issues and how to solve them.
Instructional Design Consultations offers course accessibility consultations.
Ultra Accessibility Overview has information on all the accessibility features in Ultra
- Ultra Accessibility Checker (Powered by Ally) provides information on how to use this tool to improve the accessibility of items added to a course

Best Practices

Creating accessible digital content ensures it is available and usable by all users, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. To achieve this, think about accessibility before, during, and after the creation of all digital content. Review and fix accessibility issues before sharing the content with others.
Begin by providing headings in documents, alternative text for images, descriptive links for URLs, formatting tables, including captions for videos, providing transcripts for audio, reviewing color contrast, and much more.

Learn More/How To's

NDSU provides faculty, staff, and students with licensed copies of Microsoft 365 Apps (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) and Google Workspace. The IDC lab has computers with Acrobat Pro software for the NDSU community to use.

Adobe Acrobat